My Review of James White’s “The Forgotten Trinity.”
★✩✩✩✩

The writer of “The Forgotten Trinity” strikes me as a someone so content with his own knowledge, and so sure his own views are true, that he can no longer see what he actually writes. His own incoherence no longer activates his logic alarms. He’s like a man decorated with medals who walks nobly onto the stage, oblivious to the clown shoes on his feet.

The mind that gave form to this book seems a mind forged in lay-level debate, where holy truth-seeking has been set aside to make room for rhetorical trickery and gaslighting.

He begins the book with a lament, an accusation, and a promise.

LAMENT:
Trinity “is rarely the topic of sermons and Bible studies, rarely the object of adoration and worship—at least worship in truth…”

ACCUSATION:
“Instead, the doctrine is misunderstood as well as ignored.”

PROMISE:
“Thankfully, the solution to this problem is near at hand.”

To this point, the writer is doing fine—though I doubt he truly knows how many sermons and Bible studies are actually about Trinity; my own church offered a class on Trinity just last year.

But, the writer claims to have a solution, so I see no need, yet, to nitpick his lament. Why bicker about pathology if the doctor claims to have a curing medicine?

Except, in this case, the doctor offers only snake oil.

What is the promised solution “near at hand”?

Nothing much.

Trinity is “a ‘mystery’ that we accept on the basis of faith,” because Trinity is simply “beyond our meager mental capacity to comprehend,” and God “is beyond all comprehension.” In other words, we can’t know. There can be no solution.

I once bought a book called “Making Sense Out of Suffering” that played the same trick. The dupe works like this: Highlight a problem, promise a solution, sell many books, only to then say—with as many religious clichés as you can—”there is no solution.”

If Trinity is a mystery that we must accept on faith—because we are so meager and God is beyond all comprehension—I don’t see how we can earnestly accuse people of “misunderstanding.” And, given the supposed inscrutability, why wouldn’t churches “ignore” the topic?

He confesses all of this on pages 17 and 18. Given this confession, you can imagine how pointless the remaining 200 pages will be.

Then the writer gets bold again. He sets his loathing and whimpering aside and says: “The single greatest reason people struggle with the doctrine of the Trinity is miscommunication,” and he proposes: “If someone had just sat down and defined terms clearly and forcefully, a lot of arguments could have been avoided.”

What dark meanings sit behind the word “forcefully”? I don’t know. But I agree that defining our words clearly will do a great deal of good.

Except then (I kid you not) the writer claims language impotent. “We struggle because language is a finite means of communication. Finite minds are trying to express in words infinite truths.”

Which is it? Will definitions rescue us from arguments? Or, are definitions doomed to fail?

But more than these incoherences, his prose roll thick with gaslighting. In a section called “God is Great,” the writer blames skeptics for rejecting Trinity, tracing their rejection back to their “unwillingness to admit the simple reality that God is bigger than we can ever imagine.” I kid you not, Dr. White thinks skeptics reject Trinity because they simply cannot conceive of God bigly enough.

Either that, White says, or it’s the skeptic’s attitude that has gone bad: “when men approach God’s truth with a haughty attitude, they often decide that particular elements of that truth are not ‘suitable’ to them.”

But the biggest problem with skeptics, he says, is that they try to shrink God. “We want a God we can fit in a box, and the eternal, Triune God does not fit that mold.”

To this, I say YES. I truly do want to fit God into a box. Namely, the box God has given us. The box of REVEALED THINGS. If Trinity is a mere mystery-beyond-all-comprehension, then we cannot yet call it revealed.

Skeptics reject Trinity, he says, not only because their brains cannot think big enough, or because they have a bad attitude, but also because they lack reverence and humility. He says: “One attitude of the heart struggles against an eternal God, desiring to make him ‘more like us.’ But a godly attitude, the attitude that is imparted by the Spirit of God, bows in humble reverence, and instead of struggling, it embraces in love the God who is beyond all comprehension.”

So a godly attitude, White says, does not struggle, stops trying, and accepts. And then, without such cognitive conviction, the godly attitude somehow sets itself to reverence and love.

The problem for White, though, is that a person cannot truly revere something “beyond all comprehension,” because we cannot truly discern such a thing as truly good. And a person cannot truly love something “beyond all comprehension,” because love is always indexed to its object.

White seems to know this! On the very next page, he says, “The more exhaustive our knowledge of God’s revelation, the deeper our love for him will be.”

In the end, I cannot recommend this book (and I would approach this writer’s other work with caution and suspicion).

So far, the best and most coherent book I’ve read on Trinity is: “Delighting in the Trinity” by Michael Reeves. Reeves does think we can understand Trinity, and he articulates Trinity in a simple and compelling way—in half as many pages!

ADDENDUM: A CONFESSION:

Sheesh. Brutal! Looking at this review now, two days later, I see how harsh I was. I see now that maybe I was harsher on White’s book than it deserves. Perhaps I will even add a star at some point. I mean, White does demonstrate a grasp of basic trinitarian exegesis.

Still, I confess, White’s rhetoric and style triggered something in me . . .

I’ve read so many Christian writers like James White, writers who gallop around the pages of their books waving a MYSTERY flag back-and-forth and all over, as if they’re helping the reader. When they come to something they don’t understand, they say “it’s a mystery,” and they think, I assume, they’ve said something safe to say—especially about God.

Me, I think we take a big risk when we call something a mystery—especially about God. When we claim something about God as “beyond all comprehension,” we simultaneously admit that *something* to not yet be revealed. Nothing is revealed for something we cannot comprehend. But I see a bigger risk still. For everything we claim “beyond all comprehension,” we simultaneously accuse God of being “beyond all illumination.”

What mysteries are too great for God to teach?
What darkness has the power to resist God’s light?

This is not to say there are no mysteries. Of course there are. I have no idea what “being” is, in the ontological sense. I don’t know what consciousness is.

But maybe someday I will.

I get defensive about “mystery” because it’s so often the source of academic sleight-of-hand. I once bought a book by Peter Kreeft called “Making Sense Out of Suffering.” I bought this boldly titled book shortly after my friend Jessica died, and when I most desperately needed light.

Kreeft’s answer? It’s a mystery. We cannot fathom God. We are too small. God is too big. Stuff like that.

It should be against the law to sell a book called MAKING SENSE OF X, wherein you only provide the non-answer that X DOES CANNOT MAKE SENSE.

Peter Kreeft owes me $15.

Maybe my trigger on this issue is particularly sensitive right now because I just read the brilliant biography of William Tyndale, written by David Teems. Up until Tyndale, the Catholic Church only shared scripture in Latin, which nobody but the priests knew. To church-goers, everything from the Bible was mystery. They had no idea what it said. The folks in the pews had to trust whatever the church claimed about the priest’s strange and alien incantations.

Then Tyndale appeared, and he spread his brilliant English translation. Tyndale hoped that even “a boy that driveth the plow” would know the scriptures as much as any priest.

How did the church react to this assault on mystery? They banned Tyndale’s translation, killed distributors, punished readers of the text, then hunted Tyndale down, tortured him, broke his neck, then burned him down to ash.

I suspect church leaders continue to use “mystery” as a cape under which they can smuggle their contrived authority. They don’t preach in latin anymore, but they do write with propositional logic and dense nominalizations. They pummel people with jargon so recondite, folks soon surrender under the weight: “Okay, okay, we’ll take your word for it.”

Many are the mysteries of God, sure. But I keep coming back to this conviction that God’s triune nature cannot be one of those mysteries.

I say this because Jesus expects mere humans to enact the same oneness as the triune God (John 17:22 “that they be one as we are one”).

The whole idea of separate things becoming a single thing (without losing the separateness) is not some rare thing in scripture. It’s as common as a marriage vow. Adam and Eve became “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). The great variety of persons who make Christ their Lord, despite their great variety, become the one bride of Christ (Revelation 19:7-9, 21:2,9).

True, when Paul talks about the oneness of the bride, and he compares it to the oneness of the marriage covenant, he calls that bond a “profound mystery.” Yet he expects us to understand the bond of marriage. So the mystery cannot be an experiential mystery, but merely an ontological mystery.

We all know what gravity is (in our experience), even though nobody truly knows what gravity is (in itself).

The parallels scripture uses probably connected with first century readers better than they do for us. The idea of separate things becoming a single thing (without losing the separateness) is as simple as gravity for folks who live in a collectivist society.

For us modern readers, deep in the heavy heart of Western individualism, the bond between people feels less real. It has to be proven to us.

Maybe that’s the trap writers like White find themselves in. So biased by individualism, they feel like they must understand the bond between people on some metaphysical level before they can trust their experience of any such bond.

Maybe writers like White are like a scientist who, until she knows what gravity truly is (in itself), remains convinced she’s floating.